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Exhibitions

15 May 2012

The opening of our new "Writing Britain" exhibition, and the accompanying interactive map where website visitors can mark their favourite literary places, has made me think about German books I've read which convey a sense of place.

The Germans have a name for one kind of literature which celebrates a specific place: "Heimatliteratur". This refers to a popular, often kitschy genre which grew up in the late 19th century as a reaction to growing industrialisation and depicts an idealised version of rural life. The genre has recently merged with crime fiction to create the "Heimatkrimi", detective novels which play, sometimes semi-humorously, on local traditions and stereotypes.

Although they wouldn’t be given the same label, there are more literary works which reflect the landscape and traditions of a particular region. Theodor Storm’s evocative novella Der Schimmelreiter, set on the north German coast, is a great example. But most of the German literary locations which spring to my mind from my own reading are cities.

Although never named in the novel, Lübeck is clearly the setting of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. When the novel first appeared guides were published identifying the originals of houses, streets (and characters!) in Mann's fiction. This was, of course, missing the point. Like many great books which convey the spirit of a place, Buddenbrooks is not primarily "about" Lübeck, despite being permeated with the city’s atmosphere.

Günter Grass is another author whose native city haunts his work from the early "Danzig Trilogy" novels to more recent autobiographical works. Today you can take a tour of sites in Gdánsk associated with his life and works, but like Mann, Grass uses the city not just as an identifiable physical location but also as a metaphor, in this case for the complexities of 20th century history.

Turning to a younger generation, Uwe Tellkamp's novel Der Turm is set in Dresden during the late 1980s. The "tower" of the title is based on the city's Weisser Hirsch district where Tellkamp grew up. I started reading the novel while on holiday in Dresden, coincidentally just after visiting Weisser Hirsch. Of course Tellkamp was no more writing a guidebook to his native city than Mann or Grass (although, just as with Buddenbrooks a century before, commentators have identified originals of the characters and locations in Der Turm). But being able to picture the places so clearly helped me to find my way into this complex and densely-written novel.

Finally, Berlin, especially the Berlin of the 1920s, is celebrated in many novels. Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz has been called "the most topographically correct novel of Berlin ever written", but it is Döblin's montage technique, juxtaposing excerpts from newspapers, tram timetables, popular songs and snatches of inconsequential talk, often in dialect, that really brings the city alive. The book is a difficult read and tells an often grim story of a man's attempts to lead an honest life on the margins of society, but it’s worth the effort.

For a similarly topographically exact but far gentler view of 1920s Berlin, turn to Erich Kästner's children’s classic Emil und die Detektive. To its young hero, fresh from his small-town home, Berlin is huge, bewildering and loud, but it's also a city where children play freely in the streets and courtyards and, in this case, help to track and catch the thief who has stolen Emil's money. Two very different books, but they both evoke a powerful sense of the same place at the same period.

17 August 2010

As part of her work on a forthcoming BL science fiction exhibition, a colleague asked me yesterday about examples of the genre from Germany. To be honest, I was stumped. I couldn't think of any internationally-known German sci-fi writers, and didn't remember ever coming across references to authors known within DACH but not abroad.

The only thing that immediately sprang to mind was
Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927). I didn't realise that this was adapted from her own novel by Lang's then wife Thea von Harbou. She wrote at least one other sci-fi novel, Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), also filmed by Lang. But colleagues in Exhibitions were ahead of me there and are already examining our copies of both novels and of an English translation of Metropolis with pictures from the film.

So I then turned my mind to literary fiction. I suppose it could be argued that Kafka's novels – and in particular his short story 'In der Strafkolonie' (In the Penal Colony) with its torture machine – share elements of science fiction, portraying encounters between 'ordinary' people and societies governed by alien and arbitrary rules. Similarly, Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), although lacking the technological trappings usually associated with sci-fi, nonetheless offers a vision of a future society which is part utopia, part dystopia, a typical theme of the genre.

Perhaps more on the 'forgotten classics' shelf are Paul Scheerbart, author of the 'Asteroid Novel' Lesabéndio (BL shelfmark: 12552.v.3), and Alfred Kubin who illustrated Lesabéndio as well writing and illustrating as his own strange dystopian fantasy Die andere Seite (The Other Side).

But these are all borderline cases and concerned more with philosophical allegory than with social and technologial speculation, let alone with pure entertainment. Surely there are examples of more popular German science fiction? Some secondary literature about the genre in fact provided me with the names of many writers, both popular and more literary, from Kurd Lasswitz, the 'father of German science fiction' in whose name an annual science fiction prize is awarded in Germany, to Andreas Eschbach, the most recent winner of that prize.

However, in terms of sheer scale if nothing else, the titan of German sci-fi must be Perry Rhodan, the hero of weekly serial stories first published in 1961 and still going strong after more than 2,500 weekly editions plus additional spin-offs. Although best known in DACH, Perry has followers worldwide (some English translations appeared in the UK and US in the 1970s, e.g. BL: Nov.34072). A Perry Rhodan Lexikon (BL: YA.1983.a.3370) was published back in 1983, and there’s now an online 'Perrypedia' where fans (and curious librarians) can find out about all aspects of the 'Perryverse'.

So, there's more German sci-fi than I thought; I hope there'll be room in the exhibition for some of it!

11 May 2010

Another discovered collection item which, as it is somewhat
quirky, I’d like to share with you. Unfortunately, the last couple of weeks
have been extremely busy at the British Library: I can’t remember how I
stumbled across this one – well, apart from searching for the German word
“Spiegel” (mirror) I can’t quite recall what I did. It might have been a DSC
requestor it might have been another kind of outside “prompt” making me search
for this.

This book combines three areas: first, it’s about philately, and second, how stamps mirror music. Thirdly, it’s a book printed in Germany, but refers to stamps, and therefore relates to the British Library’s Philatelic Collection. This collection, housed here in St. Pancras, has over 8 million items from
most countries of the world.

Even if you can’t read German (the explanations of the stamps will elude you), you can enjoy the reproduction of the 401 stamps in this volume. Just to give you a flavour of how this book is structured and what kind of stamps are highlighted:

Composers

Performers

Folk and ritual dances

Instruments

Interestingly, this book also points out, for example, which composers had not been commemorated with a stamp by 1984. For example, Megla identifies four composers which are missing out on philatelic stardom, but which were important for Baroque music: Dietrich
Buxtehude (1637-1707), Henry Purcell (1659-1695, I can’t quite believe that
there were no stamps commemorating Purcell by 1984), Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722)
and Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764).

I’m always interested to highlight a bonmot, or just a nice phrase, and here it must be the author of this book quoting Beethoven as saying “Nicht Bach – Meer sollte er heißen!” [Bach = brook in German, so it’s “Not Brook – He should be called Sea!”] Unfortunately, there is no reference for this quotation.

As you might be cringing already, I might as well, share the following faux-pas of the East German postal
service, when they issued a commemorative stamp for Robert Schumann in 1956. Unfortunately, the first issue contained music by Franz Schubert in the background
(see stamp to the right); the corrected version with music by Schumann is to the left.

And finally, in order to tie this blog post in to a current exhibition we have in the library (until 16 May 2010): Chopin: The Romantic Refugee. Frederic Chopin was born 200 years ago, and whereas there will probably be new philatelic items issued this year, I add the following two examples:

Many thanks to my colleague Paul Skinner for helping with digital scans of all the stamps from the British Library’s Universal Postal Union Collection for this blog post.
[CG]

30 March 2010

TheLeipzig Bookfair, 18th-21st March 2010, was an exhilarating experience. Billed as Europe’s largest reading festival, the whole city of Leipzig is transformed for a few days each year. The programme for the Bookfair is some 432 pages long and packed with variety. Thousands of publishers attend with a wide variety of publishing houses represented, but in addition, myriad stalls and information booths are assembled across the panoply of book- and information-related professions as well: bookbinders, printers-guilds, booksellers, and librarians, of course! And the whole city of Leipzig is caught up in it all.

And people do go to the Fair! Over 150,000 came this year– a record attendance. What is especially notable is the large number of young people who go. The Fair is clearly trendy – reading still rocks! The stalls for publishers of children’s literature and schoolbooks seemed the busiest of all. Manga comic costumes caught the eye everywhere. The readings by authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, in addition to those from Scandinavia, Israel, and Eastern Europe, were a high spot. Literature from Eastern Europe was a particular theme of the Fair. And there were some great authors reading from their works, including Günter Grass and Martin Walser.

The Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse is awarded in three categories: best work of German fiction, best work of German non-fiction, and best work into German translation. It was very gratifying to see ‘one of us’ win the prize for non-fiction: Ulrich Raulff,Director of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, a leading library and archives professional, won with his book, Kreis ohne Meister. The book is a history of ideas and individuals, the fruits of Raulff’s in-depth researches into the George-Kreis (of avant garde poets and philosophers) and what became of it after Stefan George’s death in 1933. And Georg Klein’s Roman unserer Kindheit won the fiction prize – a novel about children during their summer break from school in the early 1960s, on an ordinary housing estate.

But perhaps the major highlight of the Fair for me, and, I would imagine, for those others able to get a ticket for the event too, was listening to the Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Herta Müller, read from her own work. She grew up in a German-speaking minority community in Romania, and her books tell of the hardships of such an existence under the Ceauşescu regime.

If you haven't been to the Leipzig Book Fair, or indeed haven't been to Leipzig, why not put the following dates in your diary: 17-20 March 2011. That's when next year's fair takes place and I can only recommend it!

Hermann Seligman Emden’s South side of the nave of Mainz Cathedral, ca. 1858, looks fairly unremarkable at first, but if you ever have been to this place of worship you will know how dark and depressing the interior can feel. So Emden (1815-75) capturing this building in a relatively early photograph in such a good light shows a proper photographer at work (BL shelfmark: 1264.ee.16. ; p. 90 in exhibition catalogue).

Frog x-rays from Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valentia, Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Vienna, 1896) (BL shelfmark Shelfmark: 1818.c.4 ; p. 119 in exhibition catalogue) looks a bit spooky, and at first I thought that this photograph would be much more recent, both due to its high quality and to what’s depicted.

Neatly, the final item is representative of our collections in many ways. First, after a photo of a building in Germany, and a scientific picture by two Austrians, what you see to the left represents Switzerland. Second, after two photographs which are part of German Collections, the final photo is part of the Maps Collection. It illustrates nicely that if you are looking for something specific in the British Library (in this case a photograph) you might have to search across different areas and collections of the library. Adolphe Braun’s The Staubbach Falls and the Lauterbrunnen Valley (BL shelfmark: Maps 184.s.1(11.) ; p. 57 in exhibition catalogue), ca. 1866, contrasts the power and magnitude of nature with the rural human civilization of the 19th century.

There are a couple of other “German” items, some of them depicting medical, military and “ethnological” ‘objects’, which I leave for you to discover.[CG]

09 October 2009

I fear my blog posts are turning into a kind of travelogue what with Munich and Durham, but please indulge me once more for musings on Rome, where I was on holiday last week. If, as one of the speakers at WESLINE suggested, the British made parts of Italy their own in the 19th century through their travels and writings, then surely the Germans can make a similar claim. It was perhaps Goethe who most decisively put Italy, and above all Rome, on the map for Germans, and many would deliberately set out to follow in his footsteps, seeking the same inspiration from classical culture and the warm south. Indeed they still do: Rome seemed to be full of German tourists and school groups, and after English, German is the foreign language most often found in addition to Italian on notices and restaurant menus. I certainly picked up more casual information overheard from German tour guides than from English ones!

But Goethe was by no means the first German to head south. Indeed, on his Italian Journey of 1786-88 he was in part following his own father’s example, and he found in Rome an existing colony of German artists, already drawn by the classical heritage of the city. He spent much time in this community, even sharing a house with one of them, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, whose image of Goethe reclining among classical ruins in the Roman Campagna remains the most iconic image of the poet.

I actually prefer Tischbein’s more informal – but almost equally iconic – sketch of Goethe leaning out of the window of their shared lodgings (Go to http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~mmandel/recherche/goethe_casa.html for this sketch). The rooms where they lived now form part of a small museum, the
Casa di Goethe, where you can stand at that very window (the people in the office opposite must get very fed up with being stared at), as well as seeing some of the literature and art which inspired Goethe to travel to Italy, examples of letters and books, and many of his own drawings alongside those of Tischbein and other contemporaries.

If the permanent exhibits illustrate the assimilation of classical and 18th-century Roman influences into German culture, the current temporary exhibition examines more modern cultural exchanges. Taking its name from Goethe’s poetry cycle Der west-östlicher Diwan in which he sought to unite eastern and western culture, ‘Der fliegende Divan’ is based on a competition for schoolchildren from the German-speaking countries, Italy and Turkey. They were asked to reflect in art and writing on various aspects of the intercultural links between their countries and cultures, and the results were fascinating.

I said no more travelogues, but my next few blogs won’t exactly be straightforwardly work-related either. From Monday I shall be on a six-week study break, and then taking two days’ study leave a week until next March, delving deeper into our collections of 1848 revolution broadsides from Berlin and Vienna. So I shall keep on blogging, but for the next few weeks all my news will be of the joys and sorrows of a research break and the thrilling events of 1848.
[SR]

Firstly, about love (or not): at a time when arranged marriages sound anachronistic if not outright inhumane and unacceptable for most citizens in Western countries, Anne of Cleves' marriage to Henry was maybe a bit like imagining Prince Charles being forced to wed Angela Merkel. Well, allegedly it was another German's fault that the marriage between him and Anne of Cleves didn't work: Hans Holbein's portrait of the future queen apparently gave King Henry the "wrong impression". Anyway, one can speculate that a woman in the early 16th century, coming to a foreign country and neither speaking the language, nor (as far as we know) being 'inclined to the good cheer [excessive drinking] in this country.' (British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius B xxi, fol 205, catalogue, p. 223) might not have been such an easy match for Henry VIII. If you want to be judgemental about her outer appearance, or are just curious: see Holbein's miniature portrait, either in the catalogue on p. 222, or in the exhibition (be sure to keep your eyes peeled, as it is really a very small portrait).

Anyway, even though I won't be taking the risk of being thrown in the Tower (or worse), I would say that there are always two in a relationship and Henry VIII's track record goes against him, or at least he does not seem to have tried very hard to make marriages work.

Secondly, one could think that there was an immediate connection between Martin Luther and Henry VIII through both of their anti-Catholic and reformist intentions. However, Luther's challenge to the Catholic Church and therefore the pope himself in 1517 (and subsequent activities of forming a "new church"), was met with opposition from London. Henry sided with the pope and even criticised Luther for his stance. At the time he was regarded as the Fidei defensor (see also catalogue, p. 103). Henry VIII, as Defender of the Faith (this being the Catholic Faith) put his name under a Latin reposte (Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum, 1521; BL shelfmark 9.a.9). Luther didn't like this, and wrote a letter as a reply to Henry VIII (for excerpts from the letter: @ BL 4536.fff.16, pp. 27-28). Of course, as we now know, in the late 1520s and early 1530s Henry wasn't so keen on defending a pope any more, a pope who wouldn't agree to annul another marriage. Henry VIII tried to obtain some kind of spiritual approval from Luther, but over many years the German reformer did not agree to the Head of the Anglican Church's perspectives.

So Henry VIII and Germany seems to have been an unsucessful combination in many ways. All this shouldn't stop you from seeing the exhibition, or if you can't manage that, buying the exhibition catalogue which is very informative and illustrative, yet accessible. Oh, a final note: timed tickets; please click here to book a ticket now.
[CG]